


Physical Therapy

by PrettyArbitrary



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Cuddling & Snuggling, Fluff, Gen, Platonic Cuddling, Project Freelancer, hugging it out
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-14
Updated: 2016-03-14
Packaged: 2018-05-26 17:01:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6248212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PrettyArbitrary/pseuds/PrettyArbitrary
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It can be hard on the soul, being a Freelancer, but they're all there for each other.</p><p>Or, when the going gets tough, Freelancers form a puppy pile.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Physical Therapy

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt by mysticmulatto for RVB Fluff Week: I really like your idea of bed hopping freelancers. So here is a fluff prompt: platonic cuddling freelancers.
> 
> (Also partially inspired by http://submarinefleet.tumblr.com/post/138831050033/sleeping-habits-freelancers-part-1)

It’s a quirk of the Freelancer agents that none of them sleep alone if they can find a bedmate.

They all have their go-to sleep partners. Maine and Connie are Wash’s personal favorites. Connie is just the right size to hold in his arms and tuck up under his chin. She wraps an arm around his waist and throws a leg over his, and with her head cradled into the crook of his shoulder, they can sleep like that all night without moving.

Maine likes to treat Wash as his own personal stuffed animal. Wash has been spooned, flopped on, enveloped, laid on, used as a pillow, used as a blanket and, in a hideous reversal that York unfortunately got blackmail photos of, held close and tucked up under Maine’s chin. The man is a cuddling machine, and he has no off switch. Not that you’ll catch Wash complaining. It unknots something deep in his chest that gets clenched tight when they’re away on missions for days, trying not to die while killing other people as effectively as possible.

“It’s pretty fucking odd,” Niner informs them during one of her spectacular time-killing rants on the way back from some destination they were ordered to rain hell on. “I can’t tell if it’s a marathon orgy you assholes don’t have the courtesy to let me in on, or if you’re in some kind of nine-way poly relationship, or if it’s the galaxy’s laziest game of tag.”

Not that it’s like that. Sure, sometimes there can be sex, all depending, but mostly it’s just companionship. But that’s the kind of thing that sounds like soggy Hallmark card bullshit when said aloud, so none of them tries.

“Sounds legit,” Connie calls forward. “Put me down for $50 on tag.”

Being the galaxy’s greatest living experts on healthy emoting—that’s sarcasm, for the uninitiated—they don’t exactly talk about it, but he can tell the others all feel the same way. He’s recognized that desperate squeeze in York’s arms wrapped around his shoulders on nights when Carolina’s away on missions without him. And something in him could speak to the splintered-glass look he saw in North’s eyes that time Florida led him off to bed while South was laid up from a bullet to her lung. He’s felt the painful hardness fade out of Connie’s body as they pull blankets tight around each other’s backs, and out of Maine’s when he’s clutched Wash to his broad chest and rubbing his face in Wash’s hair like some kind of ridiculously enormous kitten.

Niner is Niner. She doesn’t mean anything by it, except possibly as a warning that they’d better not leave her out of any plans for orgies. But the crew of the _Mother_ do look at the Freelancers funny sometimes, when they catch them coming or going from their...Wash will absolutely never, ever accept Florida’s attempt to coin the term ‘snugglefests.’

And, well, it’s not anything like any other relationship dynamic Wash has had in his life. He has sisters, and this is way too intense to comfortably compare it to siblings. It’s not exactly friendship. He doesn’t even personally like Wyoming all that much, but there was that one time after their very bad day on that godforsaken moonbase when they burritoed themselves together in a field blanket in nothing but their armor leggings and breathed into each other’s necks until they weren’t shaking anymore. It isn’t sexual. It’s basically the diametric opposite of romance. And while he recognizes the basic mechanisms of _need_ and reliance that were at work among his old Army squad before Freelancer, the expression of it there had sure as hell been different.

“Is it weird?” he asks the Counselor during one of his regular sessions.

The Counselor knows all about it, of course. It’s his job to be up on all the motivations, issues and idiosyncrasies of the Freelancers. He thinks about it for a bit. “Do you think it’s strange,” he asks in return, because the man is congenitally fucking incapable of responding to a question with anything but a another question, “to seek emotional support from the same people you trust with your life in battle?”

“Yeah, but is it healthy to be so.” Wash has to take a manly pause to avoid squirming in his seat. God, talking about emotions is the worst. At least cars don’t want him to express his feelings about being run over. “ _Close_ to them? It feels kind of...codependent.”

The Counselor smiles in that minimalist-paternal way he has. “Codependency is a very specific dysfunction. I would categorize this more as mutual dependence.”

Oh, good. Glad that’s cleared up. The fuck. “Honestly, though. It’s not normal.”

Which at least has the distinction of for once breaking through the Counselor’s endless repertoire of canned facial expressions. He looks at Wash with a kind of haunted solemnity that’s worlds apart from his usual grave professionalism. “What is ‘normal’ in this war, Agent Washington? We all do what we must in order to survive.”

Which just goes to show: don’t fuck with a psychiatric professional unless you’re ready to be truth-bombed.

The mission was, in point of fact, shit, its dubious highlight being an extended stretch of sitting around and waiting to see whether they’d get spotted and carpet bombed or not—which as any soldier can tell you is the actual fucking worst, second only to talking about feelings. As such, once they’ve decontaminated, debriefed and bathed themselves back to an approximation of humanity, Carolina exercises her executive power and calls Movie Night.

Wash gets to the rec room early because there’s a spot on one of the sofas that is like God’s hand personally came down and molded the cushion to the shape of his ass. He’s settling in with a bowl of well-salted, decadently buttered popcorn only for South to plop down beside him, swing around and summarily deposit her head in his lap.

He stares at her like a man-eating shark has just lain down next to his dick—which, if he’s honest, is pretty close to the truth as he sees it—till she takes his popcorn away from him and starts shoving handfuls of it into her mouth.

Wyoming sits on her feet. “Share the bounty, my dear?” She passes the bowl down his way, probably mostly because Wash is getting close to success in his attempts to grab for it, despite the fact that in the split second Wyoming distracted him, she managed to lock his right arm in under her torso with some kind of half-assed jiu jitsu move he’s embarrassed to admit worked on him.

Then North lies down on Wash’s feet. Maine stretches out full-length on the floor in front of them, followed a moment later by Connie and her caffeinated sugar beverage none of them respect as coffee flopping on top of him like he’s another sofa. And, after he’s queued up the night’s viewing schedule, York drapes himself over Carolina’s lap in the armchair in what is, for her, a mind-boggling incidence of permitting York’s goofy PDA fetish. Florida takes advantage of his fairly small size and drapes himself like a cat along the overstuffed cushions that make up the back of the couch. He makes a pretty decent headrest. 

They have three movies queued and the whole team has 36 hours of post-mission downtime coming to them. Wash already knows his popcorn is a lost cause.

On the subject of the armor: the armor is kickass. It lets them do incredible superhuman things, and saves their lives on a regular basis. But they all but live in their bodysuits, which is like having your skin replaced with packing material. Packing material so dense that it can only be pierced by high-velocity weapons.

They spend about 95% of their waking hours in the damn things. When they’re deployed, sometimes they sleep in the armor, even their faces hidden from the outside world and any kind of contact for days at a time. Even when they’re home on the _Mother_ , the Director wants them in their suits as much as possible. To acclimatize, he says. Acclimatize to what, is a good question. 

The armor enhances their physical capabilities: makes them faster, stronger, more durable. With a bit of help from chemical and surgical enhancements, their musculoskeletal systems have had to adapt and grow to meet the additional demand this puts on their bodies. With time and use, their brains have literally rewired themselves, re-learning how to receive and process sensory information as the suits pump whole new categories of haptic feedback along their neural interfaces. The suits do, in fact, take quite a lot of acclimatizing to; the armor may be removable, but it still makes cyborgs out of them. And the more they acclimatize, the more they will never be the same out of armor again. After he’s been wearing it for a while, sometimes Wash starts feeling like there’s a scream burrowing into him, clawing inside his bones and cramming itself down his throat till he’s choking on it.

When he strips it off, feels it decouple and slither out from his nervous system and peel away from his body like a shed layer of skin, he feels more naked and aching raw than he ever has in his life. The only cure for something like that, really, is to grab desperately for the nearest trusted, living body and cling, bury his face in Carolina’s flaming hair while she holds him close and rubs his back till he stops feeling like a fish drowning in air. The point being, just coming out of that shit is exhausting.

They had three movies lined up, but Wash is pretty sure nobody makes it to the third one. He dozes off halfway through _Treasure of the Sierra Madre_ , and wakes up the next morning still trapped between Dakotas with Florida sagging across his shoulders like a heavy shawl. York had gotten exiled from Carolina’s lap due to shenanigans halfway through _Last Summer in Arcadia_ , and has ended up curled in against Maine’s side, with one of the big guy’s giant squid arms clamped around him. Connie is still sprawled across Maine’s chest, making a little whuffling snore that Wash will never, on pain of the slow death she’ll administer if he tries, tell her is adorable. 

Carolina’s lounging with her legs across Connie’s back, and North’s idiotically long legs are tangled up with Maine’s, Connie’s and York’s. They are in sum a hopeless tangle of interwoven Freelancers, and all of them are wearing as few clothes as they can get away with while still maintaining their personal standards of decency.

Wash slides his fingers into North’s hair, where he’s pillowed his head against Wash’s left thigh, and into South’s where she’s drooling on his right hip, and tilts his head back to rub his cheek against Florida’s warm shoulder. 

He’s probably a little bit in love with his entire squad.

“Go back to sleep, kiddo,” Florida mutters groggily in his ear, and winds an arm around Wash’s shoulders to keep him there.


End file.
